Declassified UK

Posted: 1st April 2022

February 2022

It’s Vicki Thomas this month, Head of Communications for Declassified UK.

I wanted to share with you what we’ve been up to this month, and give you a chance to get to know our team a little better. I’ve been working with Mark, Matt and Phil for around 18 months now and it’s been an incredibly busy, and rewarding, journey.

Coming from a background in independent media and fundraising, I came onboard looking to improve the outreach of our work, and to grow our community into one that can sustain our reporting. It’s very difficult for us to get funding in the traditional sense; advertising poses ethical risks and makes websites hard to read, government funding is not something we have any interest in accepting, not that we qualify given our subject matter, and a lot of foundations look to support the mobilisation of campaign groups, as opposed to the evidence needed to create change.

That’s why I’m incredibly proud, and grateful to you all, to announce that this month saw us break the 1,000 supporters mark! I can’t quite express how important this milestone is for our team.

Behind the scenes of our heavily researched articles, our informative tweet threads and our insightful short films, there are just the four of us. We all care deeply about the issues we report on, we are regularly appalled by the actions the UK government takes overseas and we refuse to let it go unreported.

Foreign policy rarely comes up against much critical coverage in the establishment media, a fact we have reported on  repeatedly. We know how important foreign policy is to the public, when they are given the opportunity to learn more about it.

We are the only media outlet in the UK that is both truly independent in our funding, and in our reporting of UK foreign policy, military and intelligence agencies and big corporations. We are grateful to everyone who reads our articles, who likes and shares our work, who follows us on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and YouTube. It makes a real difference to our outreach and allows us to speak to a larger chunk of the population, even when Facebook tries to stop us.

This month I would like to ask you all, if you haven’t already, to please support the work Phil, Mark, Matt and myself do. Every time someone signs up as a monthly or yearly member, I get an email, and I am grateful each time I see a donation come in. I know that we’re in a tough financial climate, and I know that even £2 a month can be a big ask, so from me to you, a genuine thank you to each and every one of you.

You can support us today by clicking the buttons below.

Our work this month

This month saw the war in Ukraine and Yemen rage on, but whilst the world is focused on Vladimir Putin, chief reporter Phil Miller highlighted British support for the wanton aggression from Saudi Arabia against Yemen. A war that had now been raging for over 7 years.

On Ukraine we looked into the hundreds of people leaving Britain to fight there, some led by Ben Grant, son of a top Tory politician, and some knowing they might lay down their lives in this war.

We also heard from Professor Paul Rogers who posed the question, is Putin’s nuclear threat and Britain’s nuclear posture all that different? As Phil Miller highlighted during his trip to Faslane naval base, Britain has its own nuclear arsenaltucked away down winding roads across the Scottish border. We published an editorial this month highlighting the eight dangers of a new cold war.

As Matt and Mark pointed out in their recent article, it appears as though neo-Nazis in Ukraine are in possesion of UK-made rocket launchers, and defence minister James Heappey admits it’s likely. 

This month we did some further digging into Putin and the close relationship he formed with Blair who backed the brutal war in Chechnya. Richard Norton-Taylor looked at how senior Western officials long warned of Russia’s sensitivities towards Ukraine: were the benefits of welcoming oligarchs too tempting? We evidenced how MI6-linked oil giant BP has extracted £271 billion worth of Russian oil under Putin.

In lighter news we were all thrilled to welcome home Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe. After 6 years unable to leave Iran due to being held in detention there and a £400m debt Britain refused to pay to Iran, until now. Richard Ratcliffe wrote for us last year, providing great insight into Nazanin’s imprisonment and the risk that Britain’s unaccountable armstrade poses to its citizens.

We also saw the marriage of Julian Assange and Stella Moris, albeit within the walls of Belmarsh prison where Assange is still being held while the authorities attempt to extradite him to the United States. John McEvoy highlighted the PR problemAssange has caused the UK government’s ‘media freedom’ campaign, unironically being held just a few miles away from Belmarsh.

Plus just this week Matt exposed Priti Patel’s overlooked connection to a CIA-linked lobby group, the Henry Jackson Society, a right-wing organisation that has lobbied against Assange in the British media for a decade. Importantly, Patel will soon decide whether or not to extradite Assange.

DCUK Parliament & Twitter Revue

A reminder of this – we monitor the UK parliament to capture key information that the government reveals – which we then tweet out on our Twitter account. Make sure you follow us @declassifiedUK.

If you search on Twitter for #DCUKparliament you’ll see all these tweets. Practically every day, there is something to reveal – almost none is reported in the UK press. So we see this as a public service. 

However, if Twitter is too much for you, make sure you sign up for our Twitter Revue newsletter. It’s a completely free email that I curate each Friday morning to include all the chatter around our articles and every question to parliament that we think you need to hear about.

As always, we appreciate your feedback, do let us know what you’d like to see in these newsletters, in our DCUK:INTEL reports, or in our investigations. And if you haven’t already, please check your inbox for a survey from us. It should only take a few minutes to complete and we will be sending one lucky responder a merch bundle!

Thank you once again to everyone who has become a member, and please let friends & colleagues know of our newsletter, follow us on Twitter, on Facebook and on YouTube. All our investigations can be found on our website here.

Best wishes,

Vicki.